Blog & News

May 20th, 2024

Wild Bees, Please

Author: Liz Clift, MFA

If I tell you to think of a bee, what comes to mind? Maybe a honeybee—which gets a lot of attention due to colony collapse disorder—or possibly a bumble bee. However, the United States has more than 4,000 species of bees, all of which are native except for honeybees.

Native bees, aka wild bees, are crucial for ecosystems because they have co-evolved with the plants they pollinate. They may have shorter or longer tongues to match the flowers they primarily feed from, may be able to fly relatively long distances or only short distances, and provide food for species that eat bees. Many wild bees can also be found pollinating the same crops that humans use honeybees to pollinate and may help increase yields. However, native bees remain underappreciated—and under-studied.

To be fair, it can be difficult to find and positively identify or study something that is unlikely to hold still for very long, doesn’t form large or obvious nests, and is likely solitary. To make it even harder, some wild bees are exceptionally small, such as the Perdita minima, native to the southwestern US, which measures in at less than two millimeters long—which means it can pass through the mesh of insect nets.

However, if we underappreciate the value of wild bees to ecosystems and ecosystem services, then we may not notice when a given species is in decline or understand the ramifications of that decline—much less what happens when multiple species of wild bee are in decline.

The good news is that as a citizen-scientist, you may be able to help researchers better understand bee populations in your area. Depending on where you live, this may include documenting bees through apps like iNaturalist or contributing to a bee atlas like those offered by the Washington State Department of Agriculture or the Xerces Society.

Alternately, if identifying bees isn’t really your thing, you can plant pollinator-friendly plants that have a variety of bloom times and types to support pollinators throughout the growing season, leave mulch on your garden beds for wild bees to nest in, create shallow watering areas—which is particularly important during drier seasons, and avoid or minimize use of pesticides and herbicides, which can inadvertently harm beneficial insects of all sorts, including wild bees.

At Great Ecology, we prioritize planting native species because we know how important these are to bees. This includes the landscapes at First Creek Nature Play Park and Sanderson Gulch, in Denver and at a client site in Florham Park, New Jersey among many others.

At the very least, consider getting out and looking at the bees that live near you—perhaps in your own garden or one nearby, a park, or a meadow—and see how many different bees you notice.